At present, through a shining rain, I am distressed to see a young man next to me on the bench all slumped down with his shoulders hacked to pieces by a machete, and just five minutes ago he was telling me with a smile and flawless teeth about his reasoned ambition to live here in France, the land of welcome—a young, practically French-speaking friendly Rwandan who lived, from what I could glean from his damned gobbledygook, in the dorms of the Cité Universitaire and wanted to give up his studies in Paris. He had met a girl he liked, someone of the same culture and status, and his temporary job as an interpreter for tourists on the Bateaux-Mouches was enough for him to begin integrating into society, while he waited. Waited for what? I said to him. Waited to get old? He had Camus’s
The Stranger
in his pocket, that asshole. It’s funny. When you read
The Stranger
, you always think you’re Meursault, the one who kills, the one who thinks, and never the Arab who dies like an asshole. If I were the general-in-chief of smalltown France I wouldn’t have been very proud of myself. A guy asks someone for a cigarette, the other guy’s a nonsmoker, so the first guy persists, walks away and comes back with a machete, and hacks the guy to pieces. No comprendo. I hadn’t seen the danger coming, I didn’t sense that the enemy offensive was coming around the Maginot Line either. But after all, we don’t have eyes on our backs. On our backs we have wings, right?
“Yes,” she said.
“You’re still acting in shitty films?”
“I write books,” she said. “I’m the new Virginia Woolf.”
I shouldn’t have been there in the Closerie des Lilas, a stone’s throw from Cochin and the Observatory. Famous writers had come to this brasserie, then their ghosts, finally plaques on the tables in memoriam and finally fat men smoking cigars and skeleton women coughing away.
The last time I saw the woman facing me was twenty years ago and the shitty film was a time in my life, not a masterpiece they show in the cinematheque. I should go back home along rue de la Santé with my eyes closed and lock myself up at my place. Last time, I’d managed to make her laugh with Parisian gossip, that red-haired slut in leopard tights. Maybe I had intrigued her, maybe not. I gave her a hard-on, what else can I say. I had a furious beast between my legs, a famished tiger. She looked like an elegant scarecrow at the time and now like an epileptic mummy. She was always smoking little foul-smelling cigars and she used to laugh loudly but without gaiety or any reason to laugh, aside from me. She drank large quantities of beer. Ten or twenty years ago—the last time—she was already a former dancer, or a former model, and a former American too. She already had an impressive length of service in a whole bunch of fields. She didn’t speak French very well and wasn’t listening to what I was saying. She didn’t want to listen to just anything. She was in a rush to live and now in even more of a rush, in a state of emergency really, except with me. It was as if for ten or twenty years she’d been recharging her battery and I’d emptied mine. I had absolutely no desire to be sitting across the table from her. If I could have chosen a female companion I would rather have chosen a dead woman, or one with Alzheimer’s, a mischievous little madwoman, inoffensive, hesitant, stammering, out of it, with gestures and signs of affection from another era. I was not unhappy to have left my cock in the cloakroom. I had nothing under the table that could have given me a hard time; under the table there were only cigarette butts that nobody would have thought of lighting.
I had set foot in a place I shouldn’t have, onto the other side of the boulevard. In the space of a hundred yards I’d gone through the 5th and 6th arrondissements, whereas that night I had dreamed that I belonged to the middle middle class, you know, the one people say is neither more nor less. So in that dream I was walking my dog, a ghost dog, without hurrying, and the dog starts pulling on his leash, he crosses through Sainte-Anne from rue d’Alésia to the elevated subway, then he scratches at the little metal door of the prison and he goes sniffing out sickness in the crowded ER of Cochin, as if he’s looking for something or someone. Not at all. He’s just trying to get rid of me among the crazies, the jailbirds, and the dying. He makes me go through the revolving door of the Closerie des Lilas, pulls me up to a lady with bright red hair and leopard tights, then leaves through the same revolving door and makes me wander out onto rue Campagne-Première, a street Godard used in
Breathless
. He bites the ass of the stone lion on Place Denfert, plunges into the catacombs, and to finish things off, to finish
me
off, he raises his leg on me. I wake up all pissy, sticky, sweaty, in a lukewarm smell that makes your stomach heave and breaks your heart, and makes you cry pissy, sticky floods of tears, it’s the smell of chemotherapy embalming you and profaning you while you’re still alive, I’m stretched out on a bed in a white room and the dog’s not there anymore, he must be sniffing around the Montparnasse cemetery behind the high gray walls, looking for a concession. That’s the kind of polytraumatising dream I came in for. But the worst is still to come: A doctor throws me out of the room saying I’m a simulator. Go figure Parisian life!
Sure thing. Everybody’s more Parisian than I am. The whole world is Parisian. The Chinese woman who makes little Eiffel Towers in the depths of Shanxi and the illegal Malian who sells them on the sidewalks of Quai Branly, the interpreter of Albert Camus or Jacques Derrida, and the French cancan dancer who raises her leg around Hamburg. Nothing is more Parisian than the
Mona Lisa
and yet she’s Italian, that Mona Lisa. My Parisianism isn’t worth a damn. I haven’t left the 14th arrondissement for ten years, the only one on the Left Bank through which the Seine does not flow.
“You are absurd,” the woman writer said to me.
“I am a stranger, a foreigner. I’ll never make it back home. Besides, I got an eviction notice.”
“So you’re not paying for my drink?”
“Not paying for your glass, not screwing your ass, we got no class.”
“Fuck off, you asshole, you dickhead, get the hell out of here.”
Honorable Exit
Reread this in
Lord Jim
in the bookstore next door:
We are only on sufferance here and got to pick our wayin cross lights, watching every precious minute and everyirremediable step, trusting we shall manage yet to go outdecently in the end—but not so sure of it after all—andwith dashed little help to expect from those we touch elbowswith right and left.
Less courage than indifference. Does all that really concern me?
“What?” asked the bookseller.
“Me, the eviction officer, the biopsy. What’s the use? When my mother died she wasn’t in her right mind anymore, but if she had been, what could I have done with her mind? And my children … what the hell do they care about the biopsy, the eviction officer, and me? When China opened its economy to the free market, it led to the biggest exodus from the provinces human history has ever known. Young Indian women work sixteen hours a day in export industries for a salary of fifteen euros a month. In the same month a model or a soccer player makes a million euros.”
“Are you buying the book?”
“No, I don’t buy anything anymore.”
Rue de la Santé
I humbly returned to the 14th arrondissement. As long as I was on boulevard de Port-Royal I was in the sun, broad-shouldered, with my head held high despite the humiliations of my constitution, but the end of rue de la Santé came down on me like a notch in a tomahawk, I turned off into that gorge, Little Big Horn. On my left the good guys, on my right the bad. So it was kind of hard for me not to zigzag, stagger, and go bumping from a wall to a gate, from a sentry to an intercom. Good thing I don’t walk by the prison every day, because I can’t help going inside to see my son who happens to be housed there through the fortunes of life, and he doesn’t like me to come see him all the time in the visiting room looking as if I want to get him out of there. When he sees me he always has that dismayed look he had when he opened his Christmas present under the tree—a nice book, when he was counting on a PlayStation, latest generation.
He knows very well that I don’t like knowing he’s in there, but he also knows very well I don’t like knowing he’s somewhere else. In short, I’ve never known what to do with the big guy since the day he was born. He’s a boy who has no problem telling good from evil, but claims that the former is more harmful than the latter, and the promoters of universal good have created more victims than the devotees of dirty tricks. In other words, he says the Crusades, the Inquisition, Communism, and colonialism have been more generously murderous in good faith and in the name of God’s law or man’s than a handful of rascals fearing neither God nor man.
“Why’d you come here, Dad?”
“I was in the neighborhood, passing by, son.”
“You’re sick? It’s your cancer?”
“Don’t worry, boy.”
“I’m not worrying, Dad. I’m inquiring, that’s all—you’re hanging in there.”
“I’m holding up, big guy.”
“I don’t see what hold-up you’re talking about, Dad.”
“We’re talking man to man, son, it does you good.”
“The trouble with you, Dad, is that you talk when there’s nothing to say, and you don’t say anything when I ask questions.”
“I don’t have all the answers, big guy, you don’t get answers just like that.”
“You never saw the sunny side of life.”
“And you did?”
“I’m going my way, and you’ve always been in the street. You’re the man in the street, Dad, a nobody. Nobody pays any attention to you.”
“How do you like it here? Good food?”
“I’m fine here, Dad, nobody can kick me out and nobody wants to take my place.”
“You’re pretty smart, the way things are now. People lose their jobs, can’t pay the rent anymore, their wife cuts out on them, their boys sell drugs and their girls sell their ass, all of them end up homeless, young, old—forty-eight percent of the French are afraid of becoming homeless. You got a cushy place here, don’t screw around with me.”
“Life isn’t rosy every day, Dad. The National Committee on Ethics reports that prison is a place of regression, despair, violence done to oneself, and suicide. The suicide rate is seven times higher than in the general population.”
“You know, boy, like I say, it’s not exactly all brotherly outside either. Here, at least you’re with people of your own kind. It’s like in Cochin or Sainte-Anne, or the Ursuline Convent. You see your mother?”
“No.”
“Well, I saw her on TV, on a literary show. It seemed to be going good for her: She had nice bright red hair and panther-skin tights. She was testifying about her orgasms, but nothing that could have incriminated me.”
“Hey, while you’ve got your mouth open, you’re gonna do me a favor. Not that I want to boss you around, but … you know the yellow café further down, right next to the boulevard, at the metro stop?”
“I know it without knowing it, it’s not my hangout.”
“The waiter there, his name is Willy, ask him for the package I gave him, and stash it away for the time being.”
“The time being of what?”
“That’s all, Dad, stop your bullshit.”
It’s amazing how much self-confidence this boy has now. A guy who used to give up his turn on the slide to other kids, I see him walking away, towering over the guards by a head. A kind of sun king. Well, a sun locked away in the shade. But with global warming, maybe that’s not such a bad place for it to be for the time being.
“For the time being of what?”
“You can do time without being, dickhead,” the guard answered me. “Get the hell out of here, asshole.”
Once I’m outside, I stare life in the face and I don’t see myself in it and a kind of perplexity takes hold of me, in fact a feeling of melancholy like that twinge of sorrow I used to feel when I dropped off my son, or was it his sister, with the woman who took care of them, a fine woman no doubt, often very easy-going, but certainly perverse.
Come to think of it, I’ve always abandoned my children. I left them with an inheritance of insecurity; insecurity isn’t bad, for someone who likes surprises. One day he’ll have his PlayStation. If I had the money I’d buy him one right away, I’d send him a package. But I don’t have any money, I don’t want any, I don’t deserve any. If I wanted money it wouldn’t be around here. Here, people not only have everything, they know how to use it too. They even know how to use you. They would even use my boy, if he was of any use whatsoever.
Packing Tape
The prison wall seemed even higher and longer than it had on the way there, or else the sky seemed lower.
It was 1 o’clock when I walked back under the elevated train. The café was crowded, Africans eating pink spaghetti twisted in a heap on their plate like handfuls of complicated neurons. People often think Africans are cheerful, but these were sad. It was only the owner who was merry—a red-haired white woman, with zebra-striped tights—she danced behind the counter. I think she was missing half her teeth but I could only see with one eye because of the smoke. I asked for Willy in a low voice, as if I were coming on to him.
I laboriously explained my business to this Willy, who didn’t answer because, as the boss confided to me, he’d had his vocal cords slit in Kigali, in 1994. Willy listened to me, staring straight into my eyes as if I were finally confessing that I was responsible for the massacre of his family and his whole people, as the commander-in-chief of the French army that protected the Hutu militia who murdered 800,000 Tutsis with machetes and screwdrivers. The manager seemed to agree, she wasn’t laughing anymore either. Willy disappeared and came back with a package wrapped up with tape. He put the package in a plastic envelope and then in a Nicolas wine-bottle bag. He put it on the bar and again I thought of my boy unwrapping his presents under the Christmas tree. It seemed polite to order a beer and buy one for Willy, but the manager said fuck off, asshole, we’ve had enough of you.
“Yeah, we had enough of you,” Willy echoed. “Fuck off or I’ll gut you like a chicken.”